Hingham graduation speakers quote Degeneres, 'Spiderman 2'

All four speakers at Hingham High's commencement were students. Their advice included “Be kind to one another.”

Lane Lambert The Patriot Ledger @llambert_ledger

HINGHAM – By the time Hingham’s four student speakers were done at late Saturday afternoon’s football stadium commencement, they’d quoted comedian and talk show host Ellen Degeneres, author Robert Fulghum and the action movie “Spider-Man 2.”

Maxine Bergstein, the Class of 2014 student council president, urged her classmates to take Degeneres’s advice to “be kind to one another” into their post-graduate lives.

“Be that help. Make someone’s day better, because you can,” she said.

As she encouraged her fellow seniors to be good teammates and strive for justice, she also asked, “What are we going to change?”

Valedictorian Cady Lytle drew inspiration from Fulghum’s 1988 bestseller “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” – for the lessons to share, play fair and follow the Golden Rule – and from a “Spider-Man 2” character’s comment that “There’s a hero in all of us.”

“As long as we stay honest, we can make the world a better place,” Lytle said.

Salutatorian Hannah Collins and class president Ryan McDonnell didn’t quote from anyone in the popular culture. Instead, Collins thanked the school’s teachers for such small encouragements as brief notes on reports.

“You don’t know how much it means, to make us feel capable,” she said.

“We are the fortunate ones,” she said of their school and town, “but we need to make this foundation our own.”

McDonnell, the closing student speaker, congratulated the class for their years of hard work.

“Let’s not walk through these doors,” she said. “Let’s run as fast as we can. We did it!”